Sunday was the Langport Triathlon, the final race of my season. It is a nice short sprint race which is a goods way to finish racing off for the year. Because it is also very close to me there are always lots of people there that I know.
As Langport has a pool based swim everyone sets off at different times. I was allocated a start time of 11:42 so managed a lie in on race day, how good is that? I still arrived in plenty of time and wandered round saying hello to everyone and catching up with some of my open water swimming mates that I haven’t seen since before the Ironman.
Unfortunately for my race prospects, my training since the Ironman has been very sporadic, to be honest it has been almost non-existent. Due to my lack of swimming my swim time was much slower than I was hoping. My feel for the water and technique goes very quickly if I don’t swim regularly much more than my fitness suffers. Whatever the cause I was a tiny bit slower than last year and got a recorded time of 7:32 for the 400m swim.
Running to the bike I noticed that my stupid watch had stopped. It is a Garmin 50 that I brought specifically to wear during races as it is waterproof and should record heart-rate etc for the whole race. Except it has stopped in every race I have done. Why it does this I don’t know, sometimes it seems to interact with the Forerunner 305 on the bike, sometimes it just stops. It is really starting to annoy me.
On the bike I had the Forerunner for pacing and set off at a good hard pace. The first part of the course is gently undulating and I managed to pick off and overtake a few people. Then I reached the one long hill and managed to pick off a couple more people. I even had enough breath to say hello to an old rugby team mate as I went past him. As I came to the end of the bike I spotted my family waiting by the side of the road to wave me on. Only one person came past me on the bike and I managed a time of 44:08 for the 22k course.
The run starts with a cross-country section over some fields which my family had dashed over to so they could see me off again. My legs were feeling quite heavy on the run but, thankfully, there was no pain from my knee. With my watch still refusing to work it was difficult to judge my pace or how far I had to go. I just kept pushing hard and once I reached the turn-around point of the out and back run I knew how far I had left to go. My kids were quite impressed with me when they couldn’t keep up with me as they tried to run with me on the last 100m. Time for the 5k run was 24:51, 23 seconds slower than last year.
The times I have include transition times somewhere so my total time was 1:16:31, which is 38 seconds faster than last year. That is not too bad considering I have done nothing but eat for the last month and a half.
So this season is over and I can put it to bed. Time to look to the future.
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